Mastering Foreground Occlusions With Mocha Tracking

Imagineer Systems’ Mary Poplin offers some great tips for working with Mocha tracking, specifically learning about its planar tracker. Often, new users don’t understand what the planar tracker in Mocha is doing, which can often end up with skewed or less than perfect results. One of the challenges that will come up repeatedly when tracking footage, is how to deal with occlusions. What if the thing you are tracking goes off the screen, or gets covered during the course of the shot?

All of these things can affect the track. Moving the splines as you go, isn’t really a good solution (although in some choice cases can work fine). The secret is to know and understand the relationship between the spline and the track in Mocha —They are not the same thing.

Mary walks through some challenging shots and shows how to best approach them. Watch how to set up a mocha pro project when there are lots of foreground occlusions happening in front of the thing you are trying to track. Mastering these quick tips will elevate your Mocha tracking chops!